How to Exist

Here’s an experiment for a true daredevil.

Sit there for a three minutes, following two rules:

1. Don’t do anything.
2. Be content.

By “don’t do anything,” I mean don’t move, don’t fidget, don’t indulge any thoughts or daydreams. You’re allowed to breathe, and blink.

By “be content,” I mean be completely okay with your experience of doing nothing. Don’t try to change anything, and don’t get impatient with what’s happening. Be completely okay for three minutes.  

Try that now. See how long it takes before you’re dying for it to be over.

It’s oddly difficult to do nothing, and while you’re doing nothing, it’s oddly difficult to feel at ease. There’s such a strong urge to do something: look around the room, rehash a conversation, explore your incisors with your tongue, wiggle your toes, anything. When you stop doing everything and just exist, you almost feel like you’re dying.

This is a crazy thing to notice after having been alive so many years — that your existence itself is so much to bear. There’s always something wrong, even when everything’s fine. It’s as if you can only bear the present moment when you’re trying change it into something else.

This is the strange condition of the human being. It’s allergic to its natural habitat, which is the present moment. In order to cope with this allergy, it perpetually seeks things: feelings and experiences that are not yet present. It wants to always be getting the hell out of here.

You might think that you’re free from this problem sometimes, at least in those moments when you get the thing you’re seeking. Say you’re finally eating the cookie-dough ice cream flurry you looked forward to all day. If you pay close attention as you eat it, you’ll notice that you want to move past this moment too. Lingering on any one spoonful too long becomes unbearable. There’s a powerful drive to go on to the next one. That’s why you ordered a Large.

This most fundamental problem of human life is so easy to overlook because our entire lives are made of the coping strategy. So much of what we seek is solely to flee the experience of being here. People buy things they don’t need, start fights with their partners, eat when they’re not hungry, and scroll miserable and inane content, just to escape the feeling of existence as it already is.

Notice the powerful urge to sip your drink or fiddle with something when the conversation dies at a dinner party. Or how quickly your phone comes out when there’s an unexpected wait. Existence without doing is brutal!

Each year, roughly 100 firefighters are convicted of arson in North America, often on multiple counts. Most often they are young, new firefighters, frustrated by the lack of action.

And hilariously, from a 2014 study on doing nothing:

In 11 studies, we found that participants typically did not enjoy spending 6 to 15 minutes in a room by themselves with nothing to do but think, that they enjoyed doing mundane external activities much more, and that many preferred to administer electric shocks to themselves instead of being left alone with their thoughts.

Even thinking is often a sneaky way of escaping the existence; rumination isn’t so much about trying to solve your problems, as it is about going elsewhere in your mind to escape anxiety and uncertainty. Apparently, electric shocks work even better.

How to become more comfortable with existence

You can develop the ability to exist a lot more comfortably. You do it by practicing existing, a few seconds at a time, without trying to change anything about how existence feels right now.

Basically you sit, do nothing, and notice how it feels to do nothing. (It will probably feel subtly weird and unsettled.) You then see if you can completely embrace these feelings, without the usual squirming and looking elsewhere. But you’ll do it only for a few seconds at a time, using your breath as a measuring stick.

Here’s how to do it without feeling overwhelmed:

(If you have PTSD or any other psychiatric disorder, check with a professional before you do this.)

Sit, eyes open or closed, and relax your body as completely as possible. Take long, easy breaths. Relax every muscle you can. Just do your best.  

When you’re ready, breathe in while keeping the body supple like that. Open to every feeling that occurs during the inbreath: tingling, weirdness, unsettledness, doubt, whatever. Let the whole experience wash over you like warm surf, for that few seconds it takes to inhale.

Let it go. Give yourself a moment.

When you’re ready, do it again: embrace the entire experience of one inbreath. Just let the whole experience happen to you – no need to study it, or figure it out. Just embrace the whole bouquet of feelings, for the few seconds it takes. Push away nothing, just for that few seconds of breathing in.

Once you can do that decently well (no need to be perfect), try the same thing but with an outbreath. Stay relaxed and open throughout the length of one whole outbreath. No defending, no tensing. Be a human puddle.

If you get distracted or frazzled, or you do tense up, that’s okay. Take a few breaths off to recollect yourself. Then try again. You have infinite breaths to try this with.

Repeat this process, one half-breath (an inhale or an exhale) at a time. The half-breath is a small enough span of time that you can usually stay open for the 5-10 seconds it takes. Once you can do it on both an inbreath and an outbreath, see if you can start stringing them together, staying open throughout the whole breathing cycle.

Do this for five minutes at first, including any breaks. Then see what happens when you do it longer, and with fewer gaps. Basically you’ll be resting — just existing and breathing — in that non-defensive state.

Even after one session of this, you might notice you can relax a little more easily, no matter what’s happening.

This is a form of meditation, but I almost want to avoid that word because it makes people get nervous and overcomplicate it. Just think of this practice as existing without fear, for a few seconds at a time. Minimum effective dose is one half-breath.  

Naturally, if you can learn to calm your allergy to existence a bit, life gets easier in nearly every situation. Ordinary experiences like waiting in line, feeling uncertain, being a bit too warm or cold, or not being sure what to do with yourself, become much more tolerable. (And probably most of life contains this sort of minor discomfort.)

Regular practice keeps your allergy symptoms mild. Neglecting it makes them come back.

In particular, you might notice much less of a need to entertain or distract yourself. Escape-driven habits like doomscrolling, random snacking, nail-biting, (arson?), and rumination become less magnetic. When plain old existence feels okay, there’s so much you no longer need to do.